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The original is a screengrab of a fairly low-quality video feed; I opened it in a proprietary "Blow Up" app, added some grain to conceal compression artifacts, and interpolated it to 2048 pixels wide to get a better look at what president-elect Donald Trump was angry about. He looks quite charming, if you ask me! Now, promise not to use this image anywhere else, as it would be unseemly and unmannerly.

The HiRise imager in orbit around Mars shoots a continuous stream of data about its surface our way. Nasa's posted 44,000 images so far, each available in all sorts of formats and projections. You could have one a day as your desktop background and never run out.

Olivia Jack's Pixel Synth turns images into music, scanning across the pixels horizontally and interpreting brightness values as notes. The results are peculiar, obviously, but also strangely melodic. You can edit your image, too, or simply start with a blank canvas. Click "invert" for a synthesized moment of Hammer Horror. Advanced trippers can also edit the synth parameters and the drawing tool. Read the rest

UC Berkeley researchers demonstrated software that averages thousands of similar photo to create a single representative image, like this wedding shot. Users can also refine and weight specific features within the source pool of photos to refine the average image. Read the rest

The rear end of Tinu and the head of Uno, two Eurasiers, are seen from behind a tree during the launch of the Crufts dog show in Green Park, central London, February 24, 2004. Photo: Natasha-Marie Brown Read the rest

This illustration of a flea comes from Robert Hooke's Micrographia — an amazing collection of illustrations drawn from microscope images, first published in 1665. Think of it like a proto-viral blog post that somehow fuzed Nature and Buzzfeed. Something with a headline like "15 UNBELIEVABLE IMAGES OF EVERYDAY THINGS!"

Micrographia — the whole thing — is now available in ebook form. For free. In several different formats. To give you a sense of why this is worth checking out, here's Carl Zimmer on the book's social/scientific impact back in the 17th century:

In January 1665, Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary that he stayed up till two in the morning reading a best-selling page-turner, a work that he called "the most ingenious book I read in my life." It was not a rousing history of English battles or a proto-bodice ripper. It was filled with images: of fleas, of bark, of the edges of razors.

The book was called Micrographia. It provided the reading public with its first look at the world beyond the naked eye. Its author, Robert Hooke, belonged to a brilliant circle of natural philosophers who--among many other things--were the first in England to make serious use of microscopes as scientific instruments. They were great believers in looking at the natural world for themselves rather than relying on what ancient Greek scholars had claimed. Looking under a microscope at the thousands of facets on an insect's compound eye, they saw things at the nanoscale that Aristotle could not have dreamed of.

Take, for instance, this image. Posted by Alicia Zha, it was first published by neuroscientist Wilder Penfield in 1950, as a way of illustrating connections between parts of the brain and the physical movements they seemed to control, like a pictorial atlas of the cerebral cortex. It's called the motor homunculus. And it's definitely iconic, even if it's not the kind of iconic that's liable to turn up on the evening news.

Other high points of the thread: Robert Hooke's illustrations of the cell structure of cork; the chemical structure of benzene; group photos from the first world physics conference; and early visualizations of model storm systems.